Wednesday, September 7, 2011

"Seeing Grandma" Flash Fiction Audio by Ray Dillon

I can only skip through the foggy forests of memory to get to grandmas house, and it hurts to realize I can lay out the exact floor plan of her warm home in my mind’s eye, but not the details of her warm face. While I could tell you roughly how many steps it would take to cross her screened-in porch with grass-green carpet to enter her front door, I can only offer a vague shape of her head; and on that short, pear head is not the expression of happiness and love but the feeling of it wavering in front of smooth skin where a face should be. Eyes, nose, mouth, all blink in and out, but never long enough for my eyes to process. The single detail of her I can actually envision is the drastically sagging skin of her arms that scared me at first but now pull me into the memory of her joking about it and making me laugh. She always made me laugh. She made everyone laugh. I can recall the concept of her smile as infectious. Perhaps when she smiled her rosy cheeks stood out and her eyes became crescents, but I can only speculate.

We moved away. She died a year later. I was 10.

She left the Earth and what remained was a shell of her house that was later demolished leaving no trace of her in reality. But the golden ethereal holograms of that time I took a nap in her bed, and the brick walkway to my favorite tree, and Neapolitan ice cream, and safety, and love, and her arms around me only intensify with time.

The End

I would love to hear your thoughts and I would love it if you joined in and wrote your own story to the prompt of "Grandma's Memory."